How Cross-Device Matching Works

Targeted Advertising Across Devices

Identity Resolution or identifying individuals across multiple devices (computer, phone, tablet) has become crucial for high performance marketing. Consumers are switching devices regularly depending on the task at hand. The long held belief that people research on their phones and purchase on desktop is no longer true. Finding people across their devices is important for efficient ad spend as well as customer experience, attribution and business intelligence.

In order to Cross Device Match for People-Based Marketing, advertisers need to start by identifying at least one device and matching it to the person they want to target. Based on deterministic matching, a hashed email for example, we can match multiple devices to the person anonymously. Some vendors choose to use probabilistic matching to increase the volume of potential matches but this method should only be used if the loss of accuracy is worth the improved reach.

High match rates are important but the point is to acquire matches not the percentage. People-Based marketing, especially finding the matches is a process much like email list cleaning. You will want to score your matches as well based on the confidence level of the matches deterministically or probabilistically. For example, advertising IDs sourced directly from devices is more reliable than “fingerprint” matching of IP addresses.